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Category Archives: Openwrt

So I needed a way on bootup to see if I was connected to the home wifi or not.

Figured when i’m away from home I wont be able to “see” the home network so why not just test to see if its in range on bootup, and if its not assume we’re out enjoying the great outdoors and disable the home network. This means I can have the router enable the Access Point rather than work as a bridge when i’m home

So I’ve been wrestling with a way to have the van router automagically connect to the home wifi network when ever its turned in at home.

Obviously I could simply setup the router as both a client to connect to the home network and access point to enable devices to connect to the van router. This works fine whilst I’m at home. The minute the router cant find the home network (For example when traveling) and it simply kills wifi from ever starting up meaning devices cant connect to router.

After searching the web, I’ve managed to find a very clever solution that i dont understand why I didnt think of myself. So elegant and yet so simple. Now I didn’t come up with the script. I simply plagerised it from here

On startup… Have the router try and download the google.com page, if of course this works it means we’re at home and the home network is obviously avaiable. Therefor leave it enabled.

If we try the download and it fails – Obviously the home network is not available and as such it should be disabled. Its this disabling of the home network settings that then enables the router to continue start up wifi.

now we change the file permissions.. being i’m lazy i did it this way as the router doesn’t need to be super secure. I mean come on I use it for camping.. lol

chmod 777 /usr/bin/wifi-check.sh

next we edit rc.local to enable the script to run on bootup

vi /etc/rc.local

add the following line before the exit 0 statement

wifi-check.sh &

Save the file and reboot.

You should have access to your home network. Now turn off the home wifi router and reboot your van router. You should find that after an extra 15 seconds than normal, you will have wifi available.

This is super awesome as it means we now have way to automate backup of home files to the van router when it becomes available at home. On successful uplink test we could theoretically then start an rbackup of say a movie folder. The skys the limit.

Actually I’ve just had a thought. If we start the connection at home, and then drive away do things mess up. Rather than rebooting – What if the wps button could toggle the home wifi network on and off, that might be even easier…

So, now that we’ve purchased our first caravan and progressed from caping to glamping with all the mod cons (Well the ones I can afford) it was decided between the brains trust at work, that being able to take away the entire movie library so the kids could watch anything they liked as we drove along, or if heaven forbid bad weather hits us, it will be just like being at home.

So what do we need this magical box to do

1. Provide wifi access whilst travailing in the vehicle as well as when camped

2. Provide windows file sharing of media to allow devices running xvmc or other software to access the media

3. Possibly run some sort of DLNA type server to stream media to devices that can’t access SMB shares directly

4. Possibly provide a bridge between my phones next-g connection and wifi only devices such as iPads/iPods (Not implemented yet as not required)

The size of the ext4 partitions was chosen as this allowed ample room for messing around with openwrt, whilst when considering scale, a few gb out of a tb doesn’t really lend itself to being noticed.

NTFS was chosen as the other fs type as this will mean when the HDD is plugged into a windows machine to copy moves etc to it, the ext4 parts by default will be invisible and only the ntfs partition will be visible (Protection by obfuscation)

How you partition your drive is up to you, I used an existing linux box, however gparted can be downloaded and used to do it from a usb key. Windows on its own doesn’t work as you can’t format ext4 partitions. Once you get comfortable with it, you can actually do the partitioning with openwrt, this will not be covered in this guide.

The Main Event

Connect your computer to the 703N via ethernet as I don’t trust using wifi to do a firmware upgrade

The 703N will more than likely come pre-installed with Chinese language firmware. So the first hurdle is trying to work out how to flash OpenWRT to the router in the first place.

Click the button labeled 1. and select the openwrt firmware you downloaded. Then press the button i’ve labeled 2.

After a few minutes the file will be uploaded in the router, and it will begin to reboot.

On reboot you may need to statically set the ip address of your network card. Configure them to match the settings I have listed here and your should be able to ping the router once its blue light stops flashing indicating it has booted up

Now we need to setup a password to allow us to ssh into the router.

Open your browser and connect to the router at its default address (usually 192.168.1.1). Login using username root with an empty password.

Make sure your browser accepts (session) cookies. LuCI login fails if password is set and session cookies cannot be accessed.

Then click on the left in the top bar on Administration, then go to System in the bar underneath. A page to change the password is displayed.

Write your desired password into the field Password and repeat it in the field Confirmation. Finally click on Save & Apply.

Your password is set now.

Next we ssh into the router (on mac enter ssh root@192.168.1.1 into a terminal windows)(on windows again use Putty select SSH from the connection type and enter root@192.168.1.1 as the host) you will be asked to enter the password, type it in and press enter.

Now we’ve set the admin password and logged in via ssh its time to enable wifi. (Plagirised from the openwrt wiki)

# Now to copy the required files to the usb hdd that will become our overlay

mkdir-p /mnt/sda1

mount/dev/sda1/mnt/sda1

mkdir-p /tmp/cproot

mount--bind / /tmp/cproot

tar-C /tmp/cproot-cvf - . | tar-C /mnt/sda1-xf -

umount/tmp/cproot

umount/mnt/sda1

Now we need to tell openwrt using stab how and where to mount the partition

vi /etc/config/fstab

make the following changes

#old

option target /home

option enabled 0

#new

option target /

option enabled 1

press the esc key and then press : and enter wq

now enter the following:

reboot

after rebooting the machine ssh back into the box and enter the following

df

you should see rootfs size now matches that of the partition we created

Thats it done. Our router is now using the attached USB HDD as its main storage. If we boot the router without the HDD attached it will use its own internal flash as storage. This essentially means we can have a failsafe configuration if we screw something up on the USB HDD, we remove the drive, reboot the router and BOOM we’re back in.

Now you can go ahead and install what ever you like to the drive. For us thats samba, and in an upcoming project dlna for those that don’t utilise XBMC

Configure the samba mount points as required, sit back, grab a cold one and be done iwth it.

For the next project I’m looking at recompiling OpenWrt with the required packages already built in. I’ve had success building in most if not all the required apps just need to bundle config files to make setup alot more rapid should something go wrong in the future.